Where does the time go?

Confession Time

Friday I totally forgot about picking up Alvis from school.

I was mortified and Alvis and Lavie are being kind and not rubbing it in.

Work has been pretty hectic. I'm juggling multiple projects and trying hard to remain focused. Lavie's car had to be put into the shop this week and I think we ended up spending our entire Christmas budget (and then some) on repairs. I'd put the car under the tree, but I don't think I can get it through the door. I'm not complaining, I'd feel worse if Lavie and Alvis got stranded somewhere because we didn't deal with it.

This brought us temporarily down to a single car this week. Lavie's parent's dropped in on us Friday morning and Lavie had been plaining to take me to work at a satellite office in town for me to work out of. That way she could run her daily errands. Instead I got my car and she played hooky with her parents.

So there it was, around 4:10 PM, I was deep into a proposal draft I need to submit by next week, I was on the phone with my director discussing system expansion plans and some potential problems that I identified, was wondering if Lavie's car was going to be out of the shop as planned, trying to figure out where I had buried recent pictures of a new telephone system we had installed, and my cell phone was ringing.

I saw by the caller-id it was Lavie but didn't pick up immediately as my director and I were still pondering some issues.

Then, for some reason--husband's delayed intuition perhaps?-- I looked at the clock in my laptop's system tray and all the pieces fell into place so smoothly it was frightening.

1. It was past 4:00 PM.
2. Lavie was calling me.
3. I had the only car, not her.
4. Alvis gets out of school at 4:00 PM and I was supposed to be picking her up.

I asked my director to hang for a second, called Lavie, who said "Please tell me you are at the school with our daughter..."

Ummm. I'm on my way right now!

I explained my oversight to the boss and we called it a day, discussion and planning to be picked up on Monday.

Tossed the gear in my laptop back. Saved my documents and shut down. Gathered my project papers up and dashed out the door.

About ten minutes later I pulled up to the school. Alvis was sitting in the field in front of the school with four of her friends just chilling out. She popped up and climbed in.

I apologized profusely and she just grinned and laughed. I think she enjoyed the pleasant respite.

All was well. I guess kids need to see their parents aren't perfect, sometimes, and that they are secure enough to admit it, sometimes.

Updating XP's System Time

See, I should know better to keep a closer eye on the time.

Thursday night I was checking out TV shows on our desktop system and was a bit confused. A show I had planned on watching was on at 8:00 so when I turned on the TV, it was already quite a bit into it.

Strange. That wasn't the first time I had experienced this.

So after it was done, I went back and considered why. Something seemed off, but what?

On a hunch I browsed over to The official US time website. Turns out my system clock was almost 25 minutes slow.

Ouch! Can't believe I had never noticed that before.

I checked my settings and though it was set to sync with an Internet time server, it obviously wasn't working. I tried several times to sync with the servers offered, but they all failed.

Hmm.

I disabled my firewall but they still failed.

Seems others have had occasional problems under XP SP2 with this as well: Can't use time synchronization ...

I knew that I could manually select another time server (Windows XP: Adjust Internet Time Synchronization - HelpWithWindows.com) but which one?

Luckily, I was able to find several great references to use:

• Atomic Clock Sync Information from worldtimeserver.com
• A list of the Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) time servers that are available on the Internet - Microsoft KB262680
• USNO NETWORK TIME SERVERS
• NIST Internet Time Service
• Welcome to the NTP.Servers Web
• Network Time Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I picked a nearby time server and copy/pasted it into the Internet time server field in the "Date and Time Properties" panel. I clicked "Update Now" button and it instantly updated my time.

Sweet.

I recalled doing this on this system in the past, but I couldn't find a blog-post on it, so it must have been a long time ago.

I think the time had been slowly getting behind since I reimaged and reloaded the system on it.

Anyway...there it is. Still don't know why those servers wouldn't work on the XP system. They seem to update fine on our Vista system. I haven't checked the XP laptop yet, but it's on my hit-list for the weekend.

Stay on time!

--Claus